Description: This core consists of a facility that assists all participating laboratories with tissue culture experiments, and provides assistance with histological experiments. Tissue culture will be used in all four components of this program to analyze the role and mechanism of cell adhesion molecules (Ranscht), receptor protein tyrosine kinases (Pasquale) and cell surface proteoglycans (Stallcup and Yamaguchi) by cell transfection assays and/or assays for neurite growth, synaptogenesis, and spine formation. The Tissue Culture will assist investigations of this Program Project with the transfection of cDNA constructs in cell lines and primary neural cultures, and setup primary cultures from the hippocampus to assay neuronal differentiation and synaptogenesis. One major advantage of this core is that the hippocampal culture system is standardized, so that results obtained for one of the studied molecules can be related to those for others. This will broaden the understanding of the molecular nature of neuronal differentiation and synaptogenesis, and foster additional interactions and joint experiments between the program project laboratories. The Core will also provide assistance with histological experiments by cutting frozen and paraffin sections, and perform immunostaining with various antibodies.